Feature
Desires & Devices
Charles Williams's Prophetic Warning About the Temptations of Technology by Karl D. Stephan
Every age has its besetting sin. For the United States in the nineteenth century, it was slavery. For the world of the twentieth century, a leading contender was totalitarianism in its guises of fascism and communism. And ever since Abraham, God has raised up prophets to warn his people away from their sins, besetting and otherwise. Besides the biblical prophets, whose words are for all time, novelists have also played prophetic roles through their fiction—Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and George Orwell's Animal Farm come to mind.
It may be too eary to pick a besetting sin for the twenty-first century, but chances are it will have something to do with technology. If we look for a prophetic novel that warns us of the peculiar spiritual dangers of wielding immense power through material objects, we could do worse than take Charles -Williams's 1931 novel, Many Dimensions, as a guide.
Most readers will know of Williams (1886–1945), if at all, as one of the Oxford circle of friends known as the Inklings, of which C. S. Lewis was the most famous member. Williams spent most of his life in various editorial positions at Oxford University Press, first in London and later at Oxford, to which the organization decamped during World War II. He lived a rich imaginative life and produced both well-regarded poetry and popular novels. He also found time for an unconsummated romance, and for several years he maintained membership in a secret society called the Order of the Golden Dawn. He was well-known in England as a spellbinding lecturer; after listening to Williams give a talk at Oxford on Milton's Comus, a poem in praise of virginity, Lewis wrote, "I have at last . . . seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching wisdom."
An Ancient, Powerful Stone
Many Dimensions is, strictly speaking, a fantasy, because it centers around a magical object called the Stone. But much of the novel's power comes from the contrast between the supernatural powers of the Stone and the realistic settings of 1920s England in which the Stone acts, from drawing rooms to laboratories to offices of Cabinet ministers.
The novel begins when, by dubious means, a profane adventurer and quasi-scientist named Sir Giles Tumulty procures an ancient jeweled crown from its Persian hiding place (in modern-day Iran), where generations of -guardians sworn to secrecy had kept it for centuries. Tumulty is skeptical of the seller's claim that the crown had once belonged to King Solomon. He also calls the bluff of a Persian who tells him that he who wears the Stone in the crown can travel anywhere instantly merely by wishing to. But much to Tumulty's surprise, it works.
It turns out that instantaneous travel is only one of several amazing powers of the Stone. The object can reproduce itself indefinitely: a sharp rap with a knife, and one Stone becomes two, each with the same powers. Tumulty partners with his nephew to sell a copy of the Stone, and retains the original to do experiments with. For legal reasons, his nephew suggests that they consult with Tumulty's brother-in-law, Lord Christopher Arglay, who is also the Chief Justice of England.
Arglay is an enigmatic figure. We are told nothing of his background and little of his judicial activities, which play only a peripheral role in the story. But we do learn that he is devoted to Justice in the abstract, and that his devotion takes the form of writing a book entitled Organic Law. To assist him in this task, he has engaged the services of a twenty-something secretary, Chloe Burnett. Once the reader has met Chloe, the central triangle of the novel is complete.
Not that Arglay and Tumulty vie for Chloe's romantic attentions. Rather, Chloe becomes the battleground for two rival visions of what should be done with the Stone.
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more on technology from the online archives
more from the online archives
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The Beowulf Poet Was a Shrewd Christian Apologist by Douglas Wilson
32.5—September/October 2019
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